Virtual SAN Product Overview

Radically Simple Storage for VMs

Virtual SAN simplifies and streamlines storage provisioning and management for vSphere environments. Using VM-centric storage policies, Virtual SAN provides finely granular control and automation of storage service levels. Virtual SAN is self-tuning – it automatically rebuilds and rebalances storage resources to align with the service levels assigned to each VM. It fully integrates with vSphere and the entire VMware stack to deliver an efficient and cost-effective operational model.

Lower TCO by up to 50%

Virtual SAN enables flexible, predictable "grow-as-you-go" scaling, eliminating large upfront investments. It reduces storage CapEx using inexpensive industry-standard server components with the flexibility of choosing vendors and configurations. Virtual SAN lowers OpEx by simplifying storage management through vSphere tools and automating management of storage service levels through VM-centric policies.

High Performance

Virtual SAN enables read/write caching using server-side flash. Virtual SAN is built into the VMware hypervisor, optimizing the I/O data path to deliver much better performance than a virtual appliance or an external device. Virtual SAN all-flash architecture provides data persistence on SSDs to deliver extremely high performance with consistent fast response times.

Elastic Scalability

Virtual SAN provides elastic, non-disruptive scaling of storage resources. Both capacity and performance can be scaled simultaneously by adding a new host to the cluster (scale-out); or capacity and performance can be scaled independently by merely adding new HDDs or SSDs to existing hosts (scale-up).

Software-Defined Storage for vSphere

Virtual SAN is the software-defined storage for the software-defined datacenter. Virtual SAN’s hypervisor-converged architecture enables storage and compute to run on the same physical host with minimal overhead; management is simplified through seamless integration with the vSphere Web Client and the entire VMware stack.